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Ain’t Them Bodies Saints director David Lowery is inspired by a wide range of top directors (Picture: Didier Messens/Getty Images)

Ghosts of the past and old tradition haunt David Lowery’s first feature film – and that’s just how he likes it.

‘I wanted it to feel like a folk song, something that was very familiar,’ he says. ‘A film that maybe felt like you had seen it before a long time ago but had forgotten about it. I really love folk songs, folklore and American folk tradition, and I wanted to make a movie that would function in that realm.’

The result was Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury prize last year, it’s a dreamy, out-of-time Texas outlaw romance about a man who breaks out of prison to be reunited with his wife and child. Casey Affleck plays convict Bob Muldoon – ‘He’s someone I have been a fan of for years,’ admits Lowery – and Rooney Mara is his true love, Ruth.

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‘I had seen her in The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and between the two roles, it’s hard to tell what she actually looks like,’ he says. ‘I definitely wanted it to feel like a western, trying to emulate how John Ford or Howard Hawks would use the camera and have those strong, individualistic frames.

‘We didn’t ever think of it as a western per se but we tried to view it with the sense of those classic westerns.

‘[Director] Robert Altman in general was also a huge influence. McCabe & Mrs Miller is one of my all-time favourite films: I wanted to have a movie that captured that same feeling.

I love thinking about how I remember movies; I wanted to make this feel like a memory of one of those movies. There are certain things that are a direct homage, such as the three bad guys. I make no bones about that.’

He also acknowledges Paul Thomas Anderson, Arthur Penn (of Bonnie And Clyde fame) and even French director Claire Denis. ‘I kind of obsess over her work,’ he says. ‘There are little trickles of influences everywhere you look.’

Lowery came to the director seat after working as a film editor; his work in that field to date has included last year’s cult hit Upstream Colour. Despite writing and directing several short films, he found creating the script for Ain’t Them Bodies Saints wasn’t all plain sailing.

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‘When I started, I was writing an action movie and that didn’t work out,’ he says. ‘But when I realised I could make this folk-song version, I refashioned some of the ideas. It took a year to write it, on and off, because I am a very lazy writer.’

Raised in Texas since he was eight, Lowery speaks warmly of the place and his life there. ‘There is a historical rebelliousness to the state that I really love. I find it rather cheeky and rather delightful that Texas is the only state that flies its flag at the same level as the United States flag.

‘There are a lot of politics in the state that I deplore but, overall, the spirit is something I love. And then there’s the breathtaking landscape.’